A Partial Explanation

by Peter A. Coclanis – Fall 2025/Winter2026 – Claremont Review of Books

My cmnt: This book is not worth reading. It is being reviewed in this prestigious journal because of that very fact. The commentary below and the review of this unbalanced (hence partial explanation in the title) book is worth reading.

My cmnt: Click the link above to read the entire review. I’ve edited it below for space and content. Be sure to read the amazing account at the end of the rise of Jeff Bezos.

Beginning in the late 1990s, remonstrances against capitalism—or, to be more precise, the neoliberal form of capitalism, often erroneously conflated with globalism—began to mount after reaching a low ebb in the 1980s and early to mid-’90s. The complaints picked up steam at the turn of the millennium, as evidenced by the anti-globalization protests at the 1999 World Trade Organization meeting and the public expressions of concern over China’s entrance into that organization in 2001. Anti-capitalist sentiment was further intensified by the Great Recession of 2007-09 and by the challenges posed to all of us during the COVID years. A variety of recent surveys demonstrate that many people, ranging from everyday Joes and Janes to influential members of the press, the professoriat, and the political class (most on the left, but some on the right), are down on capitalism. Among younger demographic groups, it often polls worse than socialism.

There are many lessons about all this to be drawn from Cassidy’s invigorating, often insightful, but ultimately tendentious book. Two are especially important. The first is that critics of capitalism, like the poor, will always be with us. Since the time of the so-called Industrial Revolution, where Cassidy begins his story, “the central indictment of capitalism has remained remarkably consistent: that it is soulless, exploitative, inequitable, unstable, and destructive, yet also all-conquering and overwhelming.” The second lesson, though, is that capitalism will probably not be going anywhere any time soon. Cassidy describes it at one point as a “shape shifter”: it has proven sufficiently supple, flexible, and malleable both to quell dissent and to overwhelm every alternative proposed. 

His particular bête noire is clearly neoliberal capitalism, which reigned supreme from the 1980s to the time of the Great Recession. In a broad sense, neoliberal capitalism can be seen as arising in reaction to the faltering performance of most Western economies resulting from “managed capitalism,” under which free markets were heavily leavened by government oversight between World War II and the 1970s. Most writers have come to associate neoliberalism impressionistically with Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, the International Monetary Fund, and the “Washington Consensus.” It is typically characterized as extremely pro-business, tending to support open trade, to encourage the transnational movement of capital and labor, and to reduce significantly the role of the state in economic life, including social welfare. Cassidy originally intended Capitalism and Its Critics as a history only of this era. But he came to see the problems of neoliberal capitalism as symptomatic of dysfunctions that have persisted throughout capitalism’s history, so he broadened his scope. 

Being a journalist—and not an economic historian, much less an economic theorist—Cassidy spends little time defining capitalism.

In the main, these early chapters serve as amuse-bouches for the book’s more substantive fare. Cassidy really finds his stride with chapter 8, on Friedrich Engels and The Communist Manifesto. Most of the later chapters deal with well-known critics of capitalism who are often Marxist, Marxisant, or “progressive,” to use the debased coinage of the realm. Thus we find chapters on Marx and many of the usual suspects—people such as Henry “Single-Tax” George, the anti-imperialists John Hobson and Rosa Luxemburg, the brilliant American Marxist economist Paul Sweezy, the Polish Marxist economist Michał Kalecki, and the sharp-tongued, eccentric British economist Joan Robinson. We get a worshipful chapter on John Maynard Keynes, progenitor and avatar of the “managed” social welfare capitalism that is close to Cassidy’s heart. Later chapters feature devotees of managed capitalism such as the economists Dani Rodrik, Joseph Stiglitz, and, inevitably, Thomas Piketty. 

There is also the surprising appearance of conservatives Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek. Like Adam Smith, these two Nobel Prize winners are not usually considered critics of capitalism but rather placed among its foremost champions. Cassidy believes it legitimate to include them, however, because of their opposition to Keynesian or neo-Keynesian managed capitalism. It’s true that Friedman and Hayek were critical of that form of capitalism, but only insofar as it was disfigured by state intervention. It was because they believed so deeply in markets and freedom that they resisted government attempts to “manage” capitalism through inappropriate intervention and overreach. 

The problem with Capitalism and Its Critics, then, is not the author’s intellectual acumen. The problem is that it offers only, to borrow the title of a poem by Charles Simic, “A Partial Explanation.” The book is partial in more ways than one: It is incomplete and it is slanted. It distorts the nature of capitalism and makes it difficult, if not impossible, for readers to appreciate its longevity and successes. Cassidy fails to lay out satisfyingly the arguments in defense of capitalism before enumerating its flaws. Ironically, this makes it difficult to understand the positions of capitalism’s critics, because the context of their critiques is often elided. Cassidy’s contemptuous view of laissez-faire and neoliberal capitalism, especially, is apparent in his inadequate discussion of “orthodox” neoclassical economics. He seems to view it as little more than a cynical attempt by 19th-century elites to remove politics and social struggle from economic explanation via abstraction, mathematization, mystification, and rationalization.  

The above chart was taken from: Our World in Data – click this link to see very informative interactive charts and tables.

Over the past 200 years or so, capitalism has ushered in levels of economic growth, development, and overall human flourishing unknown and well-nigh inconceivable to our species anywhere in the world at any earlier point in time. It has been responsible for an explosion of wealth creation over the centuries covered by Cassidy. In the developed world, people today are roughly 25 times richer in real terms than they were in A.D. 1800. In the developing world they are roughly eleven times richer. Even during the frequently derided capitalist era we have just lived through—that of neoliberalism, or hyperglobalization, or what have you—we find very significant economic gains worldwide, huge declines in the proportion of the world’s population living in extreme poverty, and impressive increases in living standards, educational levels, and human health, particularly in the developing world. Cassidy knows this and grudgingly acknowledges it from time to time. He even includes an astonishing graph showing the spike in global average GDP that capitalism precipitated.

The rise of Jeff Bezos – from obscurity to world fame

One can challenge the idea that another era of “managed capitalism” is even possible: not for nothing does leftist historian Jefferson Cowie refer to the 1930s-70s in the U.S. as “the great exception.” But Cassidy’s interpretation of capitalism’s long-term trajectory is seriously flawed as well. As numerous scholars over the years have pointed out, capitalism has been responsible for an explosion of wealth creation over the centuries covered by Cassidy. In his view, none of this can make up for what he considers capitalism’s worst flaw: inequality, particularly the inequality represented by the so-called 1%. In a discussion on “plutocracy” late in the book, he makes a passing swipe at Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, informing readers that “[i]n 2023 Amazon’s Jeff Bezos took possession of a custom-built 417-foot-long superyacht that came with a helipad-equipped support vessel and was rumored to cost $500 million.” We should be glad that Cassidy went to press before Bezos’s over-the-top Venice wedding to Lauren Sánchez in June 2025.  

***

Even so, Cassidy’s account of the super-rich is only another partial explanation. There is more to the story. Bezos—today the world’s third-richest person—was born to a 16-year-old high-school student from Albuquerque, New Mexico and an 18-year old who worked as a unicyclist in a circus. After learning of the pregnancy, the couple drove to Juárez, Mexico to get married. When Bezos was born in January 1964, his mother had just turned 17. His biological father had trouble financially and drank heavily, leading his mother to file for divorce a little over a year after the marriage. While working as a secretary to make rent, she also attended night school, bringing the baby along with her to classes. There she met a Cuban immigrant named Miguel Bezos who married her and adopted her baby. Miguel Bezos later graduated from the now-defunct University of Albuquerque with a degree in computer science and got a job with Exxon, which meant moving his family to Houston.  

In Houston, young Jeff Bezos attended a public elementary school and was soon recognized as a superstar student. He continued to excel in secondary school and, later, at Princeton, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and graduated summa cum laude with a B.S. in Engineering. None of this is to say that Bezos was completely self-made—his stepfather worked for Exxon and his maternal grandfather was regional director of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission in Albuquerque—but he wasn’t born on third base, either. 

Including such details would have required a more well-rounded view of capitalism and a broader appreciation of the complexities, contingencies, and possibilities of this economic system than Cassidy could muster. The sardonic, even gratuitous reference to Bezos is indicative of Cassidy’s attitude about wealth creation and wealth creators. He hurts his case in Capitalism and Its Critics by not even attempting to give capitalism—the system that enabled a transformative company like Amazon, with over 1.5 million employees and a market cap of $2.33 trillion—its proper due. That Amazon was founded in July 1994, during the height of the neoliberal era, is worth remembering too.

Peter A. Coclanis is Albert R. Newsome Distinguished Professor of History and director of the Global Research Institute at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.